Conference/meeting rooms are a common feature of modern work space. A conference/meeting room may be used for exchange of ideas between people from two to as many as the room can accommodate. Because exchange of ideas in meetings, including video conference meetings, are an important aspect of daily life for businesses and other organizations, conference/meeting rooms are typically equipped with tools for assisting participants to schedule meetings, to capture the discussions in the meetings, and so on. While commonly available scheduling applications are also used for scheduling meetings in conference rooms ahead of time, they cannot typically handle real time events such as ad-hoc meetings, availability of rooms due to shorter-than-expected or cancelled meetings, and the like.
For ad-hoc meetings, participants have to walk to the meeting rooms to determine whether a room is available or not. While a scheduling application may display room calendar information, however, that does not assure no one is currently present inside the room. The availability of a room is strictly based on whether it is scheduled and displayed through the calendaring tool for short-term planned meetings. Furthermore, occupancy information is typically not available to end users unless they walk to the meeting rooms to check whether attendees have already arrived or not.